Young Woman with White Cap, 1890

oil on canvas on board

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Albert Williamson worked during an important period of transition in Canadian painting. He studied extensively in France and Holland in the late 1880s and 1890s, acquiring the rich palette of the Barbizon and Hague Schools, and specializing in interior scenes and portraiture. A European subject matter and sensibility is clearly evident in Young Woman with White Cap. Beginning in 1904, when Williamson returned to Toronto and began to apply his European training in the Canadian art scene, he earned the nickname “the Canadian Rembrandt.” Three years later he became a founding member of the Canadian Art Club, which sought to raise public awareness of a new, sophisticated generation of Canadian artists who, nonetheless, still responded to stylistic developments across the Atlantic, such as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.